I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with a nigh-legendary science fiction bookshop (Bakka Phoenix),
several great indie publishers, and a number of respected,
well-established authors. When all three of these forces come together,
it creates an event legitimately billed as A Very Cool Thing

The plan is for these writing workshops to become a series, but the very first one featured Robert J. Sawyer (SFwriter.com). Seats were limited to about twenty attendees.

The
title of the workshop was “A Thematic Approach to Science Fiction”, and
the point was that while good story-telling is fine as far as it goes,
the stories that endure tend to have strong, profound thematic elements.
This was not the
sort of writing workshop where writers arrive with stories printed out
and critique each other. Instead, Sawyer used a Socratic approach,
asking the audience to provide example novels and then discussing what
their themes. It became clear over the course of the three-hour workshop
that stories with strong themes tended to be more memorable and more
likely to provoke reader discussion.

In
the second half of the workshop, audience members pitched the theme of
their current works-in-progress (scary but highly useful!) and received
feedback from Sawyer. I do wish there was a way to keep track of all the
writers in the room; it would be great to read the stories described in
their finished forms.

The session wrapped up with a general Q&A about writing and publishing.

I
don’t know if all of the workshops in the series will follow this exact
format, but based on my experience with this one, I will definitely be
checking for future sessions. If you write science fiction and have an
opportunity to hear Robert J. Sawyer speak about writing, you should go.